Couldn’t he just have looked out the front door and read off the street number?
I am not defending the doc. Much more to the story.
That said, we have a home in a rural area. It used to have only a RR Box number that was different than the house number. We have no house number on our door, only a number at the road.
One thing we learned when our children were small was to leave a sheet of paper by the phone. Our phone number, our house number, town too, as the rural delivery address was for another town. Complicated in the extreme. But for the baby sitter and our own young children that paper was vital.